The aim of this paper is to analyze, describe, and understand the confinement experiences of inmates incarcerated in French jails. The analysis allows us to arrive at a theoretical reflection beyond the description of the prison experience as intensifying vicious circles within individual life courses. This displacement from a sociology of prisons to a sociology of confinement experience brings us towards an original apprehension of the total institution as an exclusive substantiation of the self. Within this framework, the analysis focuses on how imprisonment and the prison experience destroy the diverse qualities of the modern individual. The approach does not limit itself to a assessment of the failure of the prison system’s reinsertion agenda. It also allows us to explore a new element of the prison’s pathos and mortification in re-accentuating the “evil poor man’s” incapacity to take control of his own existence.